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A large part of Google’s pitch for its new social networking service is that it’s easier for users to control who sees what they post on the site.
Privacy has never been a well-built suit for either Facebook or Google, but the Circles feature on Google+ is a simpler way to categorize groups of friends than is accessible on Facebook. Users are given the choice of which Circles of contacts to share a piece of content with, each and every time they post anything.
But this is a beta and there are going to be bugs. One appears to be in Google+’s “resharing” feature, which works a little like a retweet on Twitter or reblogging on Tumblr.
While it’s not a privacy error on the scale of Google Buzz, which assumed friendships between email contacts that in at least one case included someone’s abusive ex-partner, it’s a little disheartening to discover that “resharing” can, in two clicks, blow a hole in these little circles of trust.
Say a friend of mine posts a picture of his kids to hid “friends” Circle. With the “share” option on every Google+ post, I can reshare this with absolutely anyone, from another Circle to which my friend does not belong, right through to making it completely public. The same loophole applies not just to photos but to any kind of post, as far as I have read.
If he’d known about this risk (and how would he?), my friend could have disabled resharing using the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of every post, but it doesn’t seem to be possible to do this before she’d already published it. Google+ also, for now, lacks any way to turn off resharing of all your posts from within its privacy settings.
So looks like the first major bug has been found and isn’t that really what beta’s are meant to do?

So Google+ has arrived and like a stated a few months ago this is a long time coming. The funny thing about this new social media outlet is that it looks a lot like one we have already seen… Facebook. But lets talk about what is different. The thing that stands out the most to me is the Circles. Most important, Google+ is a social network of your friends, family and other contacts, a way to connect to these people, just like Facebook.

Unlike Facebook, Google+ is built from the ground up around the concept of sharing material with groups of people, called “Circles.”

This is a novel idea and personally I can’t wait to start just doing the circles there is so much more to show, so much that I have put this video and it gives you a quick overview of what Google+ is all about.

As I wrote in my last blog Apple is gearing up in September to release two new phones, the 4S and the 5. And once again I state this is no surprise with how well the Droid is doing. Doing some reading I came across an article that posted Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin stating that Google is activating about 500,000 droids a day and that is about a 100,000 increase since it’s last announcement in May. This is no doubt due to the surge in tablets that having been running the Google Honeycomb and Gingerbread phone and tablets. So after looking through all the data it looks like Droid is not a fad or laying down to Apple, it is truly the first real iPhone competition and that only means better things for us as consumers.

How the iPhone lovers may rejoice. As the great people at Apple are supposedly releasing 2 new iPhones. From what I have read reports state that Apple is launching not only the iPhone 5 in September but a faster iPhone 4 dubbed the iPhone 4S. This comes as no shock to me. With Android flooding the market with so many different phones with the Google OS on it, there needs to be more push back from Apple and this is the start. There has been much talk about doing updates the iPhone 4 and also making cheaper iPhones to fit others budgets and now it seems all of this is coming to light. The only thing that I truly wonder is if redesigned iPhone 4S will be significantly cheaper than the new iPhone 5. By significant I would hope to see a $200 dollar difference I would think, but is that asking too much of Apple? Will they just lower the price of the 4 by $200 and set the pricing of the 4S and the 5 equal or very close to each other? My thoughts are that you lower the price of the 4 for those who may not be able to afford a decent iPhone and price the 4S just under the 5. From what I have read the 5 is going to be so vastly different it would be foolish for Apple to price them the same. I can’t wait to hear the pricing structures for these phones and if the 4S and the 5 will be on the Verizon LTE.

Microsoft is trying to broaden the horizons of their product the Kinect. Which if you didn’t know is a motion camera with a microphone that can target your movements and record sounds and video. Well they introduced a brand new concept called avatar conferencing. The technology uses the sensor of the Kinect, camera and the mic to make cartoon type representations of people that can interact with others in a virtual space and it is to have realistic facial expressions and motions and is going to be in real time through natural movements and speech.
In a health-care demonstration, Craig Mundie showed the hypothetical example of a support group for people with diabetes, meeting virtually using the technology. By replaying the scene and focusing on a different part of the room, a health-care worker could see that one of the patients was struggling with something, based on in the emotions and body language expressed by her avatar. Which is shown in the picture above.
“If you get the animation of the eyes, eyebrows, face and mouth nominally correct, most of the major human emotions are accurately portrayed. You get a huge amount of cues even though you’re looking at their cartoon characters.” Stated Mundie.
This is a pretty cool concept and I would like to see how it will play out not just in these setting but in social ones as well, but it is a nice cool way to use the Kinect technology.

So from the looks of it Twitter is looking to make a bit more money with some stronger advertising. So it looks like there will be advertising between some of the short messages users see in the most active part of Twitter. So now with advertising inbetween tweets, twitter has a great opportunity to grown finically and some of the ideas are very interesting. One that I have read is to advertise deals and offers like Groupon and along with that a new set of tools in advertisers profile page to set up tweets for specific times. With all these internet companies trying to find more ways to make money, such as IPOs, this could be a safe and smart way for Twitter to make some more revenue. If the stock market gets saturated again with internet IPOs would we be looking at another crash in the market or have we learned from past mistakes?

It seems that Mac has released what is going to be the last update to OS X 10.6. The 10.6.8 update is actually in preparation for the Lion upgrade and is essentially an add on to Snow leopard. Now if you have registered your Mac you will be eligible for the Lion upgrade at a significant discount, $29.99. There are some decent changes and they are listed below.

• Enhancements to the Mac App Store to get your Mac ready to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion.
• Resolves an issue that may cause Preview to unexpectedly quit.
• Improves support for IPv6.
• Improves VPN reliability.
• Identifies and removes known variants of MacDefender malware.
• Corrects timezone data in iCal for Lisbon-Portugal.
• Adds the ability to use Kerberos authentication to a web proxy server.
• Fixes an issue when saving documents from Xcode or TextEdit when using an NFS home directory.
• Fixes an issue when importing certain media files into Final Cut Pro.
• Includes RAW image compatibility for additional digital cameras.

It has been said there are negotiations from multiple bandwidth providers such as ATT, Comcast and Verizon to strike a deal with entertainment and media companies that will impose stronger punishments on customers who refuse to stop using their networks for pirating all types of media. Although nothing is official as of yet but from what I have read it could be as early as next month.
Participating ISPs are given plenty of choices on how to respond to the toughest cases. They can select from a “menu” of responses outlined in the plan, such as throttling down an accused customer’s bandwidth speed or limit their access to the Web. For example, a suspected pirate may be allowed to visit only the top 200 Web sites until the illegal file sharing stops. The subscriber may also be required to participate in a program that educates them on copyright law and the rights of content creators. In the past, a graduated response was also supposed to lead to a complete termination of service for chronic file sharers. Kicking someone off a network is not required under the proposed agreement, from what I have read.
The proposal appears to have the potential to become one of the most potent antipiracy strategies ever implemented. The ISPs involved provide Internet access to a large percentage of the U.S. population and because they are among the Web’s most important gatekeepers, the network providers are in a unique position to act as copyright enforcers. Critics have argued that a graduated response doesn’t allow for due process. They reject the notion that an ISP should penalize a customer based solely on accusations made by copyright owners.

So from what I have been reading from tons of different sources, the iPhone 5 is going to be much different than previous iPhones. The phone whose launch is primed for September is going to have a much stronger chip and is going to have a much more advanced camera. The phone is said to have the A5 processor which is actually a stronger chip than what is in the iPad 2. The camera is said to be 8 megapixels which is up by 5 from the iPhone 4. The phone is also said to run on the new iOS 5 which was seen at the developer’s conference earlier this month. With Android gaining much needed ground on Apple, this phone will have to have some drastic changes to make people want to switch. Now that you can go to either AT&T or Verizon for iPhones expanding their market will help slow down the Android surge, but for how long?

It has been reported that there was a serious security issue on Dropbox. Apparently for a small period of time which would be for four hours you could log into any Dropbox account without needing to know a legitimate password. From what I have read it actually started around 1:54PM PDT and they repaired it just around 6PM PDT. Luckily the company is stating that only about 1 percent of users actually logged in during this time. I don’t really know how many people actually went through any issues with being hacked so to speak. So Dropbox will be investigating this issue further to stop this from ever happening again. The company has seen some very strong growth numbers in the last year and the last thing they need is security issues that could damage the growth or even stop it dead in its tracks.